'Hannibal' leaks '100,000 Facebook logins'

Then demands Middle East cyber-war truce

Common Topics

The tit for tat between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel hackers escalated at the weekend after a hacker called Hannibal claimed to have leaked the Facebook login details of "100,000 Arabs".

Pro-Israel Hannibal warned on 13 January that he had access to “about 30 million e-mail [accounts] of Arabs”, adding that he would leak their login credentials over the next 55 years in retaliation for previous "Arab" hacks of Israeli websites. He then released, via Pastebin, what he claimed to be the login details of close to 85,000 Facebook accounts, although the actual figure appears to be far less.

But in his latest missive, issued on Saturday, he announced an even bigger data dump.

“I published until now hundreds of thousands of emails and Facebook accounts of Arabs … Today I published another 100,00 [sic] accounts of Arabs,” he wrote. “I post this 100k accounts list because I want show the my huge strength. The Arabs should learn a lesson and know not to mess with me.”

The hacker, who modestly reckons that people of the Jewish nation named him “general of Israel's hackers”, then unexpectedly called a halt to the "cyber war” that has flared in the virtual Middle East in recent weeks.

“Israeli hackers, stop! Cyber war stops until further notice I will post again if they attack the State of Israel,” he wrote. “If they appear again, I again come to save Israel. Trust me. I'll always be around.”

This particular cyber-spat kicked off at the start of January, when hacker OxOmar - who said he belongs to Saudi hacking gang Group-XP - claimed to have leaked the banking details of 400,000 Israelis.